Stuffers for ground meats are well-known in the art. Typically, these stuffers are used with conventional sausage making machines to fill natural or artificial sausage casings with ground or emulsified meats. Stuffers of the prior art, and their use with sausage making machines, are described in various United States patents, including U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,813,906; 5,352,151; 4,958,411; 4,949,429; 4,940,597; 4,893,377; 4,817,244; 4,142,273; 4,110,871; and 3,949,446. A prior art device for packing and forming ground meats is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,648,153.
These stuffers and sausage making machines are also used for making the specialty meat commonly known as gyros. Gyros is typically made from one or more ground meats, including but not limited to beef, lamb, pork, and chicken. The meats used in gyros are ground to a well-known, preferred size and texture, and then moved from the sausage making machine, into the stuffer, and then to a mold.
Unlike sausages, which are comprised of ground meat inserted into a natural or artificial casing, gyros is typically made by placing the ground meat under pressure through the stuffer, and into a separate, cylindrical container. This cylindrical container is typically made of stainless steel. After the meat has been inserted under pressure into the cylindrical container, the meat takes on the cylindrical shape of that container. The cylinder may then be removed. This leaves a free-standing, bulk piece of meat in the form of a cylinder.
Protein has a muscle memory which effectively causes the ground meat to bind together, even after the first grinding. This protein memory causes the meat to stick together, much like a whole, unground piece of meat.
The manufactured gyros cylinders are typically between twenty and forty-five pounds in weight, prior to trimming. The gyros meat in this self-supporting, cylindrical form could be heated, cooked, cut from the cylinder, and then served to the consumer.
However, for historical reasons, and because of consumer and retailer preferences, this free-standing gyros meat cylinder is trimmed, until it attains the shape of a cone. It is this trimmed cone which is sent to the retailer for cooking and serving.
Significant problems result from the trimming of these gyros cylinders, to form cones. First, the shaping of this cylinder requires a separate trimming station and saw, increasing labor costs.
At this trimming station, the gyros cylinder is held at an angle, and then rotated. As the gyros cylinder is rotated, the band saw adjacent the cylinder cuts a ribbon of meat from the cylinder.
This ribbon of meat is collected, and then recycled to the sausage making machine. In the sausage making machine, the recycled meat is combined with fresh, unground meat, and then ground together.
When the recycled meat is ground a second time, it does not bind as well with the previously unground meat. Due to the loss of these binding characteristics, this combination of reground meat, and previously unground meat, cannot be used to make large gyro cones. Instead, this combination can only be used to make substantially smaller gyro cones.
Moreover, each time the meat is recycled, the texture or feel of that meat is softer, and increasingly less pleasing to the consumer's palate.
The binding characteristics and the texture or feel of the meat become progressively worse, each time the previously recycled meat is cut from the cylinder, and then recycled for a second, third, or fourth time.
As noted above, history and retailer and customer preferences have dictated a cone shape for formed, bulk gyros meat. However, gyros meat manufacturers have, until now, been unable to initially form bulk gyros meat in the desired cone shape. Thus, the gyros meat is invariably formed in a cylindrical shape, and then trimmed to create a cone. As a result, until now, the manufacturing inefficiencies and quality problems described above have persisted.
The problems in attempting to form gyros meat in cone shapes can best be appreciated by an understanding of the methods of making gyros meat in cylindrical shapes. To make cylindrically-shaped bulk gyros, ground meat from the sausage making machine is transferred to the stuffer. A rigid, round, polymeric disc is secured to the end of the stuffer.
As indicated above, the shaped bulk gyros is typically made by placing the ground meat under pressure into the cylindrical stainless steel container. The cylindrical container is mounted upon a carriage. During manufacture of the gyros, the carriage moves the cylindrical container towards and away from the stationary stuffer, and along an axis that is generally common to the axis of the stuffer.
In order to fill the cylindrical container with the ground gyros meat, the cylindrical container is moved by the carriage to a position close to the discharge end of the stuffer.
Upon movement of the cylindrical container to a position near the discharge end of the stuffer, that container is positioned for filling with the ground gyros meat. The polymeric disc is of substantially the same diameter as the cylindrical container; as a result, a seal is formed between the inner wall of the cylindrical container and the polymeric disc.
As the ground gyros meat is dispensed from the discharge end of the stuffer, the meat begins to fill the cylindrical container. As a result, that container is moved along the carriage, in an axial direction away from the stationary stuffer. The stuffer/cylindrical container/polymeric disc combination ensures that the gyros meat is dispensed into the cylindrical container at a constant pressure, and ensures that the resulting cylinder will be free-standing and self-supporting.
In contrast, in order to create bulk gyros in a pre-formed cone shape, it would be necessary to use a cone-shaped, stainless steel container, rather than a cylindrical, stainless steel container. The overriding difficulty in prior attempts to create such pre-formed cone shapes has been the inability to provide, in such cone-shaped containers, a substitute for the circular polymer disc that retains a seal when creating bulk cylindrically-shaped gyros.
The co-inventors of the present invention attempted to solve this problem through the use of a flexible, resilient hollow piston. This device and method was described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,744,130. This device and method proved, however, to be commercially inadequate. The industry did not adapt this method, but instead continued to make cylindrical gyros meat products, and then trim them to a cone shape, as described above.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a device that is capable of creating bulk gyros that is initially formed in the shape of a cone. It is also an object of this invention to create a method which permits the formation of bulk gyros in a pre-formed cone shape. It is also an object of the invention to create a stuffer that includes an end fitting having a variable geometry. In this way, as a mold casing is moved along that end fitting, the effective diameter of the end fitting increases or decreases. As a result, portions of that end fitting remain in contact with the inner wall of the cone-shaped container. It is a further object of this invention to eliminate or virtually eliminate the recycling of gyros meat that results from the trimming of excess meat from the cylindrically-shaped, bulk gyros pieces that are currently being made.
The present invention is provided to solve the problems discussed above and other problems, and to provide advantages and aspects not provided by prior art apparatus and methods of this type.